This Is Actually About How To Continue Making Radio After A Full-Scale Breakdown
Bingeworthy sits down with Kaitlin Prest and Natalie Prest. RE: Sisters, the mini-series by The Heart and Mermaid Palace for CBC Podcasts. TL;DL...This should bring you up to speed on...everything
Here are the directions I was given to find The Mermaid Womb, the basement studio space, in the basement of a beloved Parkdale Momo House.
Turn right at the end of the alley, past the garbage/recycling bins, under a fire escape, go down a set of stairs (covered in viney art). Open the door, and you’re at The Womb.
Just arriving here felt like a journey.
This Womb, thankfully, is fluffy and white, not pink and red.
I was greeted by Kaitlin Prest and her sister, Natalie Prest, in a basement room lined with raw stone walls. It’s decorated with soft white objects, a fine albino shag carpet, a wall of fake flowers, and glows with candles and Christmas lights.
Our interview breezily spanned 90 minutes and ended by force of the clock. We covered lots of territory; between Kaitlin’s early Montreal radio days, her first show Audio Smut, which then travelled with her to New York City. This eventually grew into The Heart, which was picked up by Radiotopia, the publishing collective that has been around so long by now that they feel (but don’t sound much) like a Millenial Grandmother of narrative podcasting. And then, with the help of a random philanthropic donation, morphed into an audio art company Mermaid Palace. Which is how the sisters came to make Sisters.
I could insert the transcription, which is my typical. But wouldn’t you rather just listen to how this interview started? Let me bring you into the room:
Sisters is a 5-part series that lives on The Heart, which falls under the umbrella of Radiotopia, and is published/distributed by CBC.
For those who are long-time Heart listeners, this series is going to tackle some different stuff. Yes, it’s the classic full-frontal display of memory and emotion that we know to expect from KP. But then the show goes on to break down the dynamic that is sibling dynamic. It begins at the beginning…which is Kaitlin. She is the beginning; she is the elder sibling. She is the bossy-pants older-sister.
Natalie, we learn in the series, is new to the world of audio. But she’s not new to music, performance, creating, and living life to the fullest. Kaitlin, on the other hand, has been doing this “since she was a 22-year-old baby.” If you rounded up, Kaitlin would be forty, which she is not. In radio-years, she’s been here for a while, since the early days of this industry. Long before the money flowed in. Well before most people even had a smartphone. And that point, it turns out, is relevant.
I’m going to insert clips of the interview in places throughout this article.
These selections have been minorly edited for length and clarity.
Natalie Prest 09:59
Yeah, I love it. As you hear in the series, her biggest fan. I always admired her work, I looked up to her drive, making a career out of something that is yeah, it's an art form.
Realizing that she always had recorders on the table when we were there…
Kaitlin Prest: Yeah.
Natalie Prest: We had so much tape for this project. We literally have been having a recorder on our family dinner table for years….this three-hour recording….I don't know if anyone will even listen to this ever. And then I'm the one listening and sorting logging the tape. [As] I tell Kaitlin, sometimes it's like a strange superpower that I'm not sure is for good or evil.
Like most sister relationships, this one is also full of difficult memories, big moments of disconnect, a rejoining, and then a new chapter together; which is this new creative partnership, making radio/podcasts together, under the banner of Kaitlin’s publishing banner, The Heart, which also grew into the company she founded, Mermaid Palace.
I found this series intriguing. In some parts it felt too personal. In some parts it felt too kitschy. In other parts it felt like a refreshingly honest conversation that you don’t often hear.
Samantha Hodder 17:02: You've bared your soul in a lot of different ways and been full frontal in many other ways. How does this story and the revelation that you share of your diagnosis in this series? How does that compare? How does that compare to your other work?
[Kaitlin Prest:] The Heart is a feminist show; A big part of feminism sometimes is [about] being positioned as a victim. The one who is righteously wronged, and who is the underdog?
Who is standing, who is braving the ways that systems of oppression enter the intimate spaces of our lives. Even though that's vulnerable, it's also not vulnerable at all, because everyone loves an underdog. Right?
I remember when I was making the no series, actually, I often forget that the culture was not behind me when I was making that and it shifted right after. And it was a huge relief, because that piece of work.
The Shadows is a story that's about a woman who is cheating, essentially, and trying to ask yourself whether or not it's wrong. And I guess I was gonna say, I just said that I'm a lot of the stories before position me in a more of a victim position. And that is safer in some ways, because the listener is on your side.
I wouldn't say that the villain, but I am the one who is the cause of the conflict, I'm the one who's displaying problematic behaviors, I'm the one who's causing the pain in the story, right?
I'm not the one who's experiencing the pain and we do get into I'm experiencing the pain and episode for which we weren't going to make up for it was going to be episode three, and then what you hear in Episode Five, and that's it.
Our editor, Deborah Shorindé, really drove it home and Natalie…she said: We need to get inside your head and feel your pain. Because [Katilin] has mental health issues, [Kaitlin] power issues, [Kaitlin has] have mental health issues. And now, [Kaitlin is]making boundaries and fixing [herself]. We need to experience from [Natalie’s] point of view, the pain that she’s experiencing.
Being the source of the conflict instead of the person who's trying to move through conflict…that’s right the next layer of vulnerability.
At the beginning the entire story was about the way that my mental health issues and trauma responses were causing Natalie pain. Deborah urged me to create an episode where we got to empathize with and understand my own experience of those issues instead of just positioning myself and my mental health as the villain or conflict inside of Natalie's story, or the story of the love between sisters.
If it wasn't for Deborah, I would have left the series that way and not created Episode 4 where we get to live inside my mind and my struggle. Making the series was vulnerable in a new way because I was pushing to tell a story that positioned me as the cause-r of pain, instead of the one who experiences the pain at the hands of someone else.
I mean, it's interesting thing about story and story structure and what it really means the power of being the protagonist. And I've noticed this in different stories, too, especially telling stories about love. No matter what you do, whoever, like whoever is the narrator, everyone becomes an object in that story.
Maybe I’m old
But when I first heard The Heart, I found it to be audacious. A bit shocking….but listen on and you realize that’s the point. It was intentionally pushing out boundaries for the listener.
The episode that features tape of someone actually masturbating clearly pushed all the audio limits that were able to be pushed at this time. I’m a GenXer…I’ve been nurtured to repress most of my emotions and basically all of my sexuality. And here was Kaitlin, with all that Millenial gusto, to remind me that sex is not a dirty word. I appreciated this, heartily.
And then her series No, which tackled the idea of consent, massively timely given the era of #MeToo, felt again like this was helping to start a conversation, and open some doors, that needed instructions on how to open in the first place.
Sisters tackle a whole area of the conversation which is terra nova: mental health.
As she does, Kaitlin opened the door to talk about this readily-needed area of discussion. And she does it in a way that might make you feel a bit uneasy. Because the reveal she works up to in Episode 4: What’s Wrong-isode, puts it all out there. It leaves nothing on the table of what could and should come after it.
[Samantha Hodder] 1:05:43: Maybe talking about mental health now is like talking about sex 10 years ago?
[Kaitlin Prest]: Yeah, exactly.
[SH]: I see some parallels there. And it's, it, interestingly, provokes a very similar emotion, a very similar reaction.
[KP]: Of like, repulsion, and then like, questioning, and then…
[SH]: Then understanding,and then empathy, and then curiosity. And then and then…desire. It runs, walks on the same ground. I thought was an interesting parallel. And I think I think there are people who listen who are uncomfortable about hearing that stuff and need people talking about it and naming it and putting it out there in Super explicit terms, not couched Not, not like inside a story and oblique character, but like, fall on capital letters.
Kaitlin Prest: I think that 15 years ago, I was interested in breaking down the stigma around the fact that women [can] actually have pleasure, [or] women like overtly commanding their own bodies and their own sexual pleasure. Making a story about masturbation and putting it on the radio, like, that was a huge deal.
And that was very vulnerable at the time. I recorded it, it's there. People love that story. It's called “afternoon delight,” everyone still loves it. I forgot how vulnerable that was actually doing that. And I don't know if it'll change for me, now that I've done all this therapy.
Something I'm working on in therapy right now is: Why does my definition of doing good always have some kind of relationship with the idea of self-sacrifice?
Because for most of my life, the fear that comes and then me ignoring the fear, is something that I pride myself on. It's a sacrifice that I'm making. It's a piece of myself that I'm letting go of, for the sake of something bigger. I take pleasure in that. But I don't know the more therapy I do. Who knows if I'll be an artist in five years.
The biggest joy of this publication
Is having the chance to sit down and talk to the makers about their craft. I hope that it’s part of the gold nuggets that you find in reading these (longish) posts. Hopefully, you find your time well spent scrolling these thousands of words each week (honestly thank you all for being here).
It’s a folley though, I recognize. I do try not to fall into that tired adage where I the novelist is asked “How do you write?” To which the answer, mostly truthfully, though not always articulated this way, is: I haul my ass out of bed and nail it to a chair, suffer through a lot of self-doubt and hope that I manage to get something down at the end of all of it.
Making things is often just that: Doing it. It’s often a totally unsatisfactory answer to a bad and boring question.
But inside all of this, as we all toil away to make and create an industry, inside of a medium, inside of a changing distribution format, with marketing whims that sway with the breeze, there are things to learn. About how folks do it, based on different processes. Which I’m thinking we can all learn from as we go.
[Samantha Hodder] 49:04: Process. I'm curious because it almost sounds like when you describe [your work methods] it’s a little bit like a theater production. You workshop ideas, you try something, and you go one direction and then another.
A lot of the people who read the newsletter are also makers, so I like to ask about craft.
What are those bits and pieces? You've already said that you record everything. But then, how do you start? What are some of the processes that you use to workshop and brainstorm and get to a point where you're going somewhere with the story?
[Kaitlin Prest]: Step one is whatever you think you're supposed to be making, stop. And ask yourself: What do you care about today? What do you care about now? What are you living now?
And in several of the projects I've done over the course of my life, the throwing in the garbage of the thing I was supposed to be making, and then making something that is true to the moment that I'm in. It's happened several times at this point. And so that had that step. That was step one for us.
Have the courage to throw the other thing in the garbage
Then step two, what like for me and this process, we live usually I I'll do like writing dumps, where like, I'll just like write as, like, free write, for a really long time, like, write down everything, everything that is within me to write, and then read it out loud to someone, I would read aloud to you a lot.
[Step three] Then we do these listening parties. That's a huge part of the process for us. Big, huge, big huge, like so because the perfectionist monster, internal deadlines are almost impossible to actually respect. And so we do I do this trick, I trick myself, I invite a bunch of people over for a specific day, they commit to being there, I know they're coming, I try to pick people who both who I feel really safe with.
I also throw in a couple that I kind of [people that] I'm scared of, and whose taste I really respect, or, you know, who I kind of maybe want to impress a little bit.
The conversation afterward is crucial. After those moments, like that's how come we decided to like that we played that role all the staff and they're like the sister episode.
That's the other thing I guess for me in my process, and people really hate this, but I refuse to do paper edit. I don't do it. When people are submitting work to me, I'm like, I'm so sorry, you're just gonna have to make it into a full-on rough cut. I will not read your script. So in that, you can tell that it's very sound first.
You can tell that we’re getting to the end of this now. But what would an interview be without a look to the future?
It’s interesting to think that as young as Kaitlin is, she’s been here for 15 years. And by the end of the interview, I got the sense that those years weigh heavy on her.
I remember sitting in the audience at the Third Coast Festival in 2018, when Kaitlin delivered her keynote address, wearing that red sweater that was featured in her series The Shadows, which she made with her gang of collaborators and friends. The speech went long into all of these connections and friendships. It gave the air of an avant-garde artistic community.
I remember thinking: Is collaborating that easy? Is that what successful collaboration looks like? I had just been devastated by a collaboration that blew up. It was a subject on the front of my mind.
It wasn’t long after that that Nicholas Quah prophesized that it would be ‘the year of Kaitlin Prest.’ At the time I remember thinking: That’s a weight to carry.
Here’s a look back, to look forward.
[Samantha Hodder] 1:10:07: Last question…Is this Mermaid Palace 2.0 3.0? What is Mermaid Palace now?
Kaitin Prest: That's a very good question….you're going to have to just wait and listen for the next season when I actually put out the capitalism show!
[The show is] supposed to be a memoir about my relationship to business, my relationship to business as a radical feminist and [about me] being nakedly honest.
I was very anti-capitalist when I was in my early 20s; you know [the thoughts] that you have as a young person that set you on a path. It's the story of the punk band that got famous, because they were so “fuck-the-establishment,” and then suddenly, they [were] the establishment, and [now] they're interfacing with capitalist structures that are basically a synonym for all of the other structures of oppression that are exploitative, damaging and violent.
So it was supposed to be about all that.
[SH]: So what is Mermaid Palace? Or The Heart…or are they the same thing?
[KP:] The reason why I say they'll have to wait for the show is because it’s a big part of recovery and healing. Me realizing, learning about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) went hand in hand with questioning across the board. Because my art and myself have not been separate.
The idea of my company, Mermaid Palace, and its mission, and what I wanted to do with it…and then, having kind of a nervous breakdown; the breakdown was not separate from the trauma of trying to try to do values-aligned social justice work inside of a capitalist structure. All of those struggles around that contributed to the breakdown that I had.
And the relationship between BPD and all that is linked to me, is wholeheartedly linked.
When I was asking myself, what's wrong with me? It wasn't a question of “What's wrong with my mind?” But [it was] also: “What's wrong with this configuration of trying to make work?”
Most of 2021 was me kind of trying to quietly figure out policies and structures for running a company that were actually aligned with my values.
I used [some of] the philanthropic funds that I had [received] to take a step outside of capitalism for a second, and question literally every single way that a business runs; policies like having mental health days, having mental health be the top priority, having a certain amount of mental health days per month…
Having paid days, once a week, where people just get to make their art and it's not for the company. We just had to stop it, because now I have no more money left (because I was trying to destroy capitalism) but that's going to be part of the story!
What does it mean to run a company that's truly supportive of people? How do you navigate all that stuff? And so you know, those are all questions that I was asking in 2021.
That's how the money came [in before] I said in one episode of The Heart [who wants to donate to this idea?] And then someone wrote to me and gave me money.
So, what is Mermaid Palace is a complete question.
I wanted to make a utopia and it's been really hard. And everyone knows that utopias don't exist and and so maybe the answer to what is Mermaid Palace? Like that's something that I'm still trying to figure out, you know?
[SH]: So what are the next steps for you?
[KP:] So there was Mermaid Palace, Chapter One, which was 2020. We did three shows that year, the “new” Heart, Asking For It and Appearances.
And then the next step was supposed to be me making the “capitalism show” about the invention of Mermaid Palace, and it was going to be kind of like Startup; what Startup was to Gimlet would be to Mermaid Palace…but I was too depressed. Suddenly I had all this time to make my own work. And that's when I fell apart.
Mermaid Palace is one thing, The Heart is separate. Right now, I’m reimagining what I want Mermaid Palace to be after trying to do things in a really like radical way. And then seeing the limitations of an idealistic way of running a company and asking questions about my own desire to be in a leadership position.
It's really, really hard. And especially being in a leadership position with mental health issues, like those two things together. I don't even know how I've done it this whole time.
And then, The Heart is also asking questions: How do you make a show grow up that you started when you were a 22-year-old kid? And [then] continue to make something within that framework as an adult woman?
The Sister series is a step in the direction of a different version of what the show will become and what the show will be. We'll be expanding the frame a little bit.